Heart Plus in Powder Form Coming Next

Vendors can be maddening. One vendor's sales rep was incommunicado while a production run was running late. Tess left voicemails. I left a voicemail. No word. Nothing.

Finally, I had Tess call and track down the sales manager. Voila. Suddenly, we got a return call and a status. Our rep said unconvincingly, "I didn't get any of your voicemails. Did you try my cell phone?" Ah, the old gremlins in the voicemail defense.

We had our regular Tuesday afternoon Co-op call with Teri and Stephen yesterday and relayed the story. Teri's response cracked us all up. "Oh, yeah, our voicemail does that too when we have bad news!"

Stephen talked about another vendor with whom he had to talk tough, saying: "It's okay to tell us things aren't going well. It's not okay to avoid our calls until you have good news. You're fired the next time you do that." Going to our rep's manager got the same results.

It's funny too, how now that we're talking again, it's like nothing happened. We did get encouraging news on the Heart Plus Powder we're working on (another Cell Nutritionals product).

We're working on bringing out a new powder formulation that delivers 12 tablets worth of Heart Plus (vitamin C, l-lysine, l-proline, rose hips) per scoop and offers 30 scoops per jar. For our Heart Plus fans, taking 6-18 tablets a day, while effective, is no picnic.

We have to change the form of vitamin C (calcium ascorbate) to create more stability in the powder form. Otherwise, the formula turns orange, then red, then brown, and becomes sticky after exposure to air. Not pretty.

The R&D batch will ship next week to us (plain, no flavoring). Stephen hopes it will work without flavoring as an addition to morning protein shakes (think: Constant Health). The flavoring consultant thinks an orange flavor will be better and will send us a flavored sample in a couple of weeks. We're hoping for a vanilla flavor to test as well.

T. David Thompson, yes, I have you on my list to taste test the samples. Cutting white powders and sending them through the mail is just one more of our value-added services for folks who keep in touch as well as you do!

As background, David currently grinds his Heart Plus tablets and has gotten excellent results, staying off statins with his nutritional regimen. He's been very vocal about us needing to do whatever it takes to get the powder formula on the market! Here's what David wrote in our product reviews section:

"By 1997, I was having angina when exerting myself. In 2000, my M.D. tried to scare me into having an Angioplasty procedure by which a tube is run up the groin artery and an injection is made to view and clear the heart blood supply. Of course, this is a very risky procedure in the hands of an inexperienced person, because if the artery is punctured, they have to immediately open the chest and do open heart surgery! So, I ordered and began taking the Heart Plus. Within several months, my cholesterol had been reduced to much safer levels, and I no longer had angina. It is my understanding that the Lysine part of Heart Plus acts as a sort of "solvent" by which the arterial plaque is slowly dissolved and in fact removed! I interrupted taking the Heart Plug tablets in 2003 because of their large size, and I am still waiting for the powder form. I'm 77 and owe my life to Heart Plus as well as sundry other supplements from the Coop, and I did it without going broke."

Meanwhile, I'm debating about changing the name for the powder formula.

Our current members know and love Heart Plus (it's at the top of the Top 10 list only always).

However, we keep getting so many referrals from Bill Henderson for his anti-cancer protocol that I wonder about other names that get at the value of this Linus Pauling-inspired, collagen-building, heart-healthy, connective tissue-friendly formula.

For a good read on the theories behind the Heart Plus formula, read Mike Ciell's article "One Pharmacist's View of Coronary Heart Disease."